Posts by Jacob Chavez36

Mark Torres14 said:Look, staying on topic: reason is the phenomenon that lets us step back and look at our own "self" from the outside. You can't even wrap your head around freedom—or by extension, will—without that ability to view your own existence in relation to everything else, both the imaginable and the unthinkable.
We’ve hit on this countless times, and I think we’re mostly on the same page here. Talking about "free will" automatically assumes there's such a thing as "unfree will"—conditioned will—as its equal opposite. It forces us into a binary where we can't imagine anything beyond a simple North vs. South divide.
But we haven't actually tackled the core concept of "will" itself, which is way more complex and vital. In all this, "freedom" is just being treated as an adjective.
Is there such a thing as the negation of will? A "non-will"?

I mean, we deal with unfree will every single day. We head into a Target or a Walmart thinking we're choosing exactly what we want, but most of the time, we're just falling for some clever ad campaign or a subtle suggestion. Our "decision" is really just a reaction to manipulation that we might even be aware of, yet we don't bother fighting back. That’s conditioned will, not free will.

Mark Torres14 said:Look, staying on topic: reason is the phenomenon that lets us step back and look at our own "self" from the outside. You can't even wrap your head around freedom—or by extension, will—without that ability to view your own existence in relation to everything else, both the imaginable and the unthinkable.
We’ve hit on this countless times, and I think we’re mostly on the same page here. Talking about "free will" automatically assumes there's such a thing as "unfree will"—conditioned will—as its equal opposite. It forces us into a binary where we can't imagine anything beyond a simple North vs. South divide.
But we haven't actually tackled the core concept of "will" itself, which is way more complex and vital. In all this, "freedom" is just being treated as an adjective.
Is there such a thing as the negation of will? A "non-will"?

But then again, reason is something we're taught, which suggests it isn't inherently free either. I guess you need a bit of actual free will to want to crack that shell and see what's actually going on underneath the surface.

I guess you could say we actually have free will, but only if we’re capable of acting in alignment with our own human nature.

To me, freedom isn't some reckless "I'll do whatever I feel like in the moment" kind of thing. It's more about having the capacity to do what actually fulfills us as human beings.

It even changes how you look at happiness. If you follow Spinoza’s logic in *Ethics*, happiness is basically just the transition from a lesser state to a greater one—essentially, it's the process of finally realizing that free will.